ONLY IN AMERICA, with its 50-odd-million households participating in lawn care and its 16,000 golf courses, is turf an estimated $40-billion-a-year industry. That is roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Vietnam. The United States is far and away the world's leader in cultivating perfect, weed-free, ultra-trim, supergreen grass. How did the greening of America come to pass?
The leading theory, mentioned in news reports, rests on genetic predisposition. According to the "savanna thesis," human beings are attracted to grassy open expanses because we evolved as a species in Africa. "We spent 98% of our evolutionary history in those savanna-like environments," the ecologist John Falk once explained. "Our habitat preference for short grass and scattered trees seems to be a vestige of that history."
The problems with the theory extend beyond a lack of evidence. The hypothesis, for example, does not explain why Americans, in particular, are so attached to closely cropped green grass when all human beings -- whether they are French, Nigerian or Chinese -- presumably shared in that same evolutionary experience.
A better explanation rests on history and ecology. While it is true that lawns in the U.S. go back to the time of Washington and Jefferson, only after World War II did the perfect-turf aesthetic emerge. The story begins in the late 1940s with the mass production of suburban homes. Every one of the 17,544 homes built in Levittown, N.Y., was surrounded by grass. But the quest for perfectly groomed expanses of turf doesn't really begin until the 1950s.
First, you need to understand some ecology. We tend to associate bluegrass -- one of the most common lawn grasses -- with Kentucky, but the species actually hails from the moist, cool climates of Eurasia. Trying to grow bluegrass and other cool-season species here that are not indigenous to North America is thus an uphill battle. Many turf grasses, for example, need an inch of water per week during the spring and summer, or more rain than normally falls anywhere in the continental U.S. during these seasons.
That the deck is stacked against perfection is bad news for the homeowner but a potential windfall for the chemical lawn-care business. Beginning in the 1950s, companies selling herbicides and fertilizer used advertising to cultivate the perfect-turf ideal.
